Author: Karen Wan

In the last year, I received several inquiries about how to get started generating income as a writing coach. Today, I’m sharing a rather long response, with the sincere hope that it will help those of you who might like to become a writing coach, but wonder how to get started.

First, for truth in answering, I’m not a great person to teach marketing of one’s skills and talents. So much of my work as a writing coach comes from word of mouth, serendipity, happy past clients, and requests to help on certain projects. My experience is rather haphazard, in terms of a career trajectory.

This is why I am recommending a few marketing coaches, who by the way, are not paying me a dime to recommend them. When I use affiliate links, I let you know. The people I recommend in this article are coaches I’ve worked with directly. I have used their materials, and they offer approaches to marketing that are genuinely innovative, inspirational and helpful.

The following ideas are suggestions based on my experience and observation of other writing coaches. Hope these nine ideas expand your ideas of what is possible for you:

In the beginning, be willing to do different kinds of writing coaching to see where your skills might be most needed. For instance, you may think you are a great editor, and should focus on that one skill, when maybe many of your clients actually need an accountability coach, which from my experience is what a lot of writers need (and that includes professional and experienced writers).

Work with hubs where your clients hang out. (See Tad Hargrave – Marketing for Hippies for a great resource for marketing of all sorts! I had worked with hubs prior to reading Tad’s work, but never realized that’s what I was doing.)

Examples of hubs for writing coaches could be:

Professional writer’s societies

Writing conferences

Online writing groups

Libraries

Local Coffee Shops

Spas and resorts

Local business organizations

Any places where your clients may show up

When I suggest that you work with hubs, I mean begin by donating your time and talents, to become known as a resource to the hub, and then offer your services.

As a recent personal example, I serve on a Sustainability Board for my city, and ended pulling together and writing a significant portion of the update of our sustainability plan in 2016. This was entirely pro-bono work, but I knew it would not only keep my writing skills fresh and increase my connections to my local community, it was something that deeply mattered to me. This project also was part of my ongoing attention to expanding my own writing portfolio. The people on the team know of some of my skills by seeing what I offered. This isn’t a perfect writing coaching example, but gives you one idea of how to work with a hub, in this case, a local government board.

3. If your financial situation allows, pick and choose the types of clients and projects that you will accept. Sometimes, you need to accept any work you can get. At this point, I prefer to work with men and women who care about the sustainability of our planet, small business owners, healers, artists, teachers, earthkeepers, overall folks with a good heart. Tad Hargrave would call this defining a niche.

4. Keep improving your writing and coaching skills. This may mean working with other writing coaches to see where your writing could improve. We all have our own approach to improving our writing, but generally we need editors to help us refine our work. Learning to be your own editor is very important, and helps you work as a coach. Since part of being a writing coach is helping your clients improve their writing, it’s important you know how that is done.

5. Understand your client’s pain. Much of marketing tells us to focus on our client’s problems and challenges. My experience as a writer and a writing coach tells me that writers encounter these problems regularly, meaning there are continuous opportunities for coaching writers through:

Loneliness

Resistance

Fear of Failure

Fear of Success

Fear of Being Seen

Learning How to Proceed When You’re Stuck

Inexperience

Lack of Marketing Skills

Challenges with Grammar, Sentence Structure, etc

Difficulty in Finding Your Voice

These are just a few common challenges. As a writing coach, you can help with all these areas or focus on one or more of them. You might ask yourself, how have you overcome these problems? See if you can discern a process that might be useful to teach others as a writing coach.

6. A few words about credentials. Some writing coaches have degrees from fantastic universities, numerous coaching certificates, best-selling non-fiction books or novels. Almost all writing coaches have experience creating finished projects such as books, user guides, e-books, grant writing, marketing materials, novels, short stories, or poetry.

As a writing coach, one of your goals should be to understand how different kinds of writers finish writing projects. Your credentials and portfolio matter, but showing how you can help writers finish their projects through your blogs, magazine articles and videos might help you more.

My advice is don’t go and get a credential just to become a writing coach. If you want a MFA for credibility or your own personal growth, that’s fine, but that alone is not necessarily going to get you clients. Your ability to help other writers with their problems and finding their bliss is a better focus If you’re set on getting accredited in some way, consider coaching while you’re working on building your credentials.

7. Understand your client’s bliss. Many of my clients work with me because I understand what brings them joy. In my experience, many writers write for the joy of:

Creativity

Expressing Their Voice

Learning About Themselves From Writing Their Story

Completing Long-cherished Dreams

Sharing Their Wisdom

Developing a Sense of Competency

Expanding A Sense of Connection to a Community of Readers

Remember that one of your overall goals as a writing coach is to help your client experience the joy of writing. If you can help people find the joy in writing, clients will want to work with you again and again.

8. Marketing our skills is often a challenge for many of us, and I don’t claim to be an expert in this area, though I have helped scores of businesses to write marketing materials. Maybe you have found this to be true — it’s often easier to help someone else market their products and services than yourself.

A marketer who has helped me to open to the joy of marketing is Mark Silver of Heart of Business. His is a spiritual approach to growing your business that I deeply admire and recommend.

9. My last tip is observe and learn from the work of writing coaches that you admire. I find many different writing coaches to be helpful. See what you like about their programs, processes or systems for working with clients. You may find that the writing coaches you encounter are missing something that would make them an even better coach. Become the kind of coach that you wish existed!

For the last year, I have been focusing on several writing projects and building up a program I call The Listeners Path. This work is still very much in the beginning stages, but is the culmination of the wisdom I’ve gained in my many years of experience in writing, sustainability advocacy, coaching and project development. I am very excited to be developing this next phase of my career.

One of the programs I offer through the Listeners Path is called a Season of Living Well, which is a monthly program that I customize for the particular group of people working with me during that season. Since I’m doing some writing coaching this season, there is going to be more focus in this Season of Living Well on completing writing projects, and writing as a restorative practice from March 20 through June 21 2017.

In general, the Season of Living Well process begins with a quick project questionnaire. You then work with me to create daily and/or weekly targets as part of seasonal project goal, receive a weekly check-in letter and a monthly video from me on energies of transformation, as well as a monthly group teleconference. You don’t have to be doing a writing project. Almost any project, can be advanced significantly in 3 months. If this sounds interesting, check the Season of Living Well program out here.

If you would like to learn more about my work, and receive ideas on how to live well in our deeply connected world, I would love to have you join my free Listeners Path newsletter here. The newsletter is the primary place, where I will be sharing writing, coaching and lifestyle tips during 2017.

I hope today’s post offers some helpful ideas for those of you who have an interest in becoming a writing coach. There are many great writing coaches out there. You could become one too!

A writer is not so much someone who has something to say as he is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things he would not have thought of if he had not started to say them.

William Stafford

Writing can help you as a source of income.

Writing can help plant seeds of intention that eventually blossom into a new lifestyle.

Writing can help solve long-standing problems in your life, your community, and in our world.

The problem with achieving writing goals is that it’s satisfying for a while, but not too long, based on my experience, and several authors I know.

We get our first article published, or make our first check as a professional writer, and after a time, the enchantment of reaching an external goal wears off.

But hopefully, the enchantment of writing as a practice starts to take hold.

After writing most days for over 20 years, I have found that the biggest value of writing comes when I view it as a practice.

Every writer is different, we all have our own practice of writing.

Some writers have a natural ability and drive to see writing as a practice. They neither glorify or diminish their writing.

You have probably heard about writers like the poet William Stafford (1914-1993) quoted at the beginning of this post, a former poet laureate of the United States who consistently awoke in the wee hours each morning and wrote a poem every day for as long as he lived, which resulted in a prodigious output of over 20,000 poems and 60 books. Or the business writer who happily writes copy or product guides and user manuals for her whole career.

For me creating a practice was more of an accident, than intentional. I started to notice that I didn’t need to meet any goal to keep writing. I found that daily writing protected my sanity on those days when life crushed my spirit.

Over the years, I observed that different writers practice writing in whatever way that suits their soul’s calling and development, and that trying to copy someone else’s practice didn’t work.

Whether you write for someone else, for your own business, for yourself or as a creative artist, nothing is more helpful for your development than taking the time to periodically review the state of your writing practice.

If you want writing to be your destiny, you have to practice.

Today’s contemplation: What is the state of your writing practice now?

One of the great joys with my business, has been helping writers to expand their writing practice as a coach. If you’re interested in learning more about how to develop your writing practice in a way that suits your life and goals, click here.

I spent over a decade of my life as a professional business writer. Add to that my years as a Sustainability Director at a non-profit in Chicago, which required that I do a lot of grant writing and create many types of marketing collateral, I did a lot of writing. Even during my years as a product engineer, writing was a big part of what I did to make money. And during all these years, I appreciated editors.

I never had much problem in receiving criticism on ways my business writing could be improved. It wasn’t difficult to keep a distance from my writing.

Creative writing is different for me, but probably shouldn’t be so much.

Many years ago, I took a few classes where my creative writing was critiqued in workshops, and I mostly hated the process. I can’t really imagine getting a MFA where my creative writing would be workshopped and made to fit some mold.

Yet, I have to admit that I will need an editor for my novels.

I have been refining and editing drafts of my novels for years.

This year, I will finish the first novel, because my attitude about writing the novel is beginning to feel like it did when I was writing professionally for someone else.

I have stopped thinking of my creative writing as needing to be perfect or precious. I want it to be beautiful, which I believe is a different focus.

Thought for today: How do you view your writing as less precious, so that it can be edited and refined to be the best it could be?